This invention generally relates to the liquid cooling of electronic equipment, and more particularly to minimizing the volume of coolant lost in the event of a leak in liquid cooled electronic equipment.
Data centers are facilities that house numerous computer systems arranged in the form of electronics racks. Typically, a data center may house on the order of a few thousands of electronic racks. Each computer system in a rack may include one or more processors, memory devices, controllers, power converters and manipulators and other such electronic components which perform different operations and dissipate varying amounts of heat. Moreover, depending upon the state of operation, a computer system may dissipate on the order of few hundreds of Watts to thousands of Watts. Therefore, a significant amount of cooling is required to keep the electronic components within an optimum operating temperature range (typically, 75° C. to 85° C.).
According to the 2007 Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency, in 2005, server driven power usage amounted to 1.2% of total US energy consumption. Over the past several years, energy use by these centers and their supporting infrastructure is estimated to have increased by nearly 100 percent (United States Department of Energy Information and Communications Technology Roadmap). In the face of growing global energy demand, uncertain energy supplies, and volatile energy prices, innovative solutions are needed to radically advance the energy efficiency of these data center systems.
Recent studies have shown that cooling energy comprises about 25% to 40% of the total data center energy consumption. Liquid cooling of computer systems is one method of increasing the cooling energy efficiency. However, concerns, such as liquid leaks, limit the market penetration and implementation of liquid cooling solutions for data center cooling.
In conventional liquid cooled systems, the liquid coolant is provided by a liquid coolant distribution unit. In the case of a liquid coolant leak, there is a high probability that the entire volume of the liquid coolant in the concerned leaking liquid loop could be spilt. Thus, the entire computer system connected to the leaking liquid loop needs to be shut off, immaterial of where the leak originated, resulting in shutting-off unaffected computational resources/systems.